At game's end he will return to the prairie, probably stopping by the office to make one more recruiting call, watch one more tape.

Kelly is NFL-bound, everyone thinks, after Thursday night's Fiesta Bowl. He is given credit for perfecting maximum-speed offensive football.

He is 49. Snyder is 73, a great-grandfather. On his 49th birthday he was still the offensive coordinator at Iowa.

John Madden says most coaches "got their best grades in recess" and should never be accused of genius.

The point is not that Kelly isn't a legitimately innovative coach or that he didn't earn these opportunities.

The point is that you should not judge an arrival by the trumpets.

Bill Snyder was Kansas State's "19th choice," according to the athletic director who hired him.

A vote by his peers would reveal him as the best coach in college football.

Nobody knew that in 1989, when Steve Miller called Snyder to Manhattan after getting this backhand recommendation from Michigan's Bo Schembechler: "Get him the hell out of the Big Ten."

But a certain group of Knights, from the early 1970s, was not surprised.

Snyder spent three years coaching Foothill High. He came from Indio High, and he would leave to become an assistant at Austin College, an NAIA school in Texas.

"Even at the time, we knew," said Mike Lubinski. "He was too good for high school. But what I remember was his car in the school parking lot. Could be Saturday morning or Sunday night. He was always there."

Snyder was 16-8-3 at Foothill. Athletic Director Bob Osborne succeeded him in 1975, went 10-1, and won CIF. The Knights were neither large nor numerous, since Snyder's time demands weren't for everybody. Yet they won, and, years later, they remember.

Lubinski was a 170-pound lineman. When Foothill played Katella he had to line up against Jim "The Anvil" Niedhart, who became a famous pro wrestling heel.

"Bill taught me enough technique that I was able to get in his way before Niedhart threw me over," Lubinski said. "He could teach you everything about every position, and no detail was too small. It wasn't enough to get a first down. You had to do it perfectly."

That never changed. Before Kansas State flew to Japan, Snyder wanted to know which side of the plane would be facing the sun. The Wildcats thus would sit on the other side, the better to sleep.

Such hyper-diligence was required. Kansas State wasn't just a graveyard; that would assume that life had existed there before. K-State was the first 500-game loser in the game and had the worst record in Division 1-A history before Snyder got there.

Snyder has won 170 games at Kansas State, 130 more than any previous Wildcats coach. At one point they had five 11-victory seasons in six years. This bowl game is his 14th.

"He always had our back," said Paul McGaffigan, who was a sophomore quarterback for Snyder at Foothill and played at Long Beach State. "But if I remember one thing, it would be, 'We're going to run this play until we get it right.' And if it was dark, it didn't matter."

"But there was no complaining," said Jose Cueto, now a doctor in Sacramento. "Every Monday he'd give us this playbook to prepare us for Friday. He worked on it all weekend. We were in every game, never got our butts kicked. We knew everything the other team did."

Snyder was so commanding that he often didn't have to tell the players to jump. "We were scared of him," Lubinski said. "We couldn't get anything past him."

He left for Austin College and, after a few years, wrote to North Texas State coach Hayden Fry requesting a job interview – and included a playbook. Fry hired him, then took him to Iowa for what became glory days, and a Rose Bowl trip.

Lives went on. Andrew Katnik became an anesthesiologist. Lubinski is an assistant Orange County district attorney. They watched Snyder on TV whenever they could, and smiled.

Then lymphoma visited Katnik. He was gone in a year's time. During his illness the boys reached out to Snyder, who called back. He also wrote a letter, which Cueto read at the funeral, at St. Cecilia's in Tustin.

This was 2005.

"That was so emotional, I get choked up even now,' Cueto said. "For him to remember us after all that time. ... It's life lessons. Responsibility, work ethic, family. You realize how lucky you were to have somebody like that in your life."